Like a lot of folks, you might be considering buying a loved one some fancy coffee gear to make fancy coffee as a Christmas gift. By which I mean, you're probably thinking about buying somebody a French Press. Please don't.

Used as typically directed, the coffee it produces is kinda dirty. Or as coffee ronin Mike White puts it, "The relatively porous filter lets a lot of particulate and sediments into the cup that normally remain behind. What you end up with is a cup full of body and texture, but lacking delicate clarity."

Meaning if you're buying fancy coffee for your folks to put in their fancy press, the fancy taste isn't going to come through very well. With a press, it's also relatively easy to underextract the coffee—for a discussion of coffee extraction and strength, click here—even for a former world barista champion. (Related: Have you had coffee in France? It's terrible.)

Of course, you could skip the press and get your folks a lovely manual pourover setup that's in vogue in the fanciest of fancy coffee shops. But in addition to the $30 bucks or so you'll drop on the dripper itself, there's another $50 or so to drop on a fancy kettle, needed to precisely control pouring flow and direction to stay within the ever so slight margin of error afforded by a manual pourover method. Did I mention it's tricky, too? Aren't you trying to give them an easy way to make awesome coffee?

Buy them a Clever coffee dripper. It's cheap. Fifteen bucks. It's portable. Most importantly, it's really, really easy to make good coffee with a steep-and-release device, easier than almost any other manual method. Throw in coffee. Throw in water. Let it sit for a few minutes, like a French Press. Then put it on top of a cup. The coffee draws down into the cup, through a paper filter—which means more flavor clarity and no gritty coffee. Easy, right?

If you don't take my word for it, listen to Scott Rao, author of fancy coffee books for fancy coffee people. In his book Everything But Espresso, he lauds Clever-like brewers because "they produce high-quality, uniform extractions more easily than do manual pourovers." In other words, even earth-killing, button mashing K-Cup fanatics can use it.